Why is the Popularity of Vbulettin?

Kaybenson

I was planning to set up a forum but from my research many successful forum uses Vbulletin.

What is the secret?

Secondly, there are different prices quoted online for Vbulletin. Why that?

Any advice welcome?

Cheers

markfj

personally I would use Phpbb

if you have a host already, chances are his wold be free in the admin cpanel too.. and ha some very good applications which are quite easy to install

Kaybenson

When PHBB is free, why are people still rushing to Vbuletin?

bonzer

Lots of commercial products still sell even when there are perfectly capable free versions. I suppose it's a combination of customer familiarity and support offerings.

Businesses that rely on software often have an aversion to "free" because they want someone to shout at when things go wrong. If your important site goes down, you want contractual guarantees that it will be fixed which is something that free doesn't offer. While the free developers may fix problems quickly, they don't have to. RedHat is still in business even though the [virtually] identical CentOS is free.

If your site isn't critical to you making a living, I'd probably try the free option.

KillerWatt

Kaybenson wrote: »

When PHBB is free, why are people still rushing to Vbuletin?

Probably because phpBB is open source, which means any flaws are more likely to become common knowledge